The power of strategic career planning

Episode Transcript

Hello, my name is Julianna Yau Yorgan and I’m a career coach who helps introverts succeed in the workplace by unleashing their introvert superpowers.

Today, I’m going to share with you what it really means to plan your career strategically, why it’s so important for your long-term success, and why it’s a powerful tool for introverts.

I chose this topic because I know it’s tempting to take an opportunity that pays more and moves you into a more senior role. Even if it doesn’t really fit with your long-term career goals.

I’ve been offered many opportunities like this before and maybe the most significant one was when I was actively headhunted by a multinational tech company to manage their social media customer service team…only for the job to be changed to a regular call center manager role when they made the offer.

Because I had a clear strategy and vision for my career, I confidently turned it down. A lot of people thought I was crazy. But I ended up Landing a promotion and a raise a few months later.

And for those of you keeping track, yes, that was two promotions and two raises in less than a year after being laid off from Blackberry.

So let’s get to talking strategy. First of all, what does it even mean to be strategic in your career planning?

It’s about more than just your next role. It’s really about envisioning your career five to ten years out, thinking about the type of work that you’d be doing, who you’d be working for, and other things like where you’ll be doing the job, what that ideal workplace looks like.

For some people it could be head of engineering at a company like Google. For others, it could be something like becoming regional VP for a sales organization. And for others, it might be something as simple as becoming the go-to person for an area of expertise at their company or within their industry.

No matter what it is. That part is all up to you. You’re the only one who knows what you’ll be happy is doing and what you’ll find the most fulfillment.

Once you figure out what that looks like for you in 5, 10, however, many years, then the next start the next step of your strategy is identifying the skills and experience you need to get there.

Once you know what those skills are what that experience looks like that will land you that final destination type of role, then it’s a matter of drawing the little dotted line from now until then and match that to the roles that will get you those skills and experience.

Second why is it important to your long-term success to have a strategic plan?

First of all, it creates and retains control in your career. It really puts you in the driver seat so that you are telling a more powerful story–an intentional story of career moves that you’ve plotted out for yourself taking you to that ultimate dream job instead of your career happening to you know, where you’re just saying. “Okay. Well, I guess this next job sounds kind of cool and I can do it. Sure. Let’s see where it goes.”

And I’m sure for some people that’s just part of the adventure. But for those of us who have a dream job in mind a role that we want to achieve, it’s really is important for us to have a strategic plan so that we’re not distracted and taken off course by something that’s tempting us in the short term.

And then of course the third: why is it so powerful for an introvert. Most introverts like to have a plan. It gives us some comfort some familiarity knowing that the next steps are the ones that we have imagined.

It’s less of kind of just drifting off in the wind and seeing what happens, which again may work for some people, but I find most introverts like to have that plan in place. And similar to pre decisions, which I talked about last week, is it takes the stress out of on-the-spot decisions.

So when somebody does present you with an opportunity, you can think back to your strategic plan and think okay, either this job is a match for a lot of the skills and experience that I need to pick up that will take me to that dream job or you know what this is completely off course similar to when I was offered just a call center roll. It didn’t fit. My trajectory didn’t fit the type of experience that I needed to become known for somebody in project management.

So whether it’s me, whether it’s you having that strategic plan will enable you to turn down those opportunities that don’t actually progress your career in the direction that you want. And then the last thing that it gives introverts is a sense of internal confidence.

I find that because it is so hard to turn down a really good opportunity, we do that with confidence knowing that is the right decision for us knowing that there is something better just around the corner that will serve our career long-term, it exudes this confidence that knows amount of bragging or dancing in the car to your favorite song will do for you.

Okay, that’s it for now.

Next week, I’ll be sharing a success story of a client who’s boss didn’t believe she had the potential for a promotion and how I helped turn her boss around and get her that promotion she knew she was ready for.

I’ll see you then.